Belle is much more engaged when she’s fending off Gaston (Luke Evans) or conversing with her father

(Kevin Kline). She looks unsure of how to react when she’s watching a bunch of silverware put on a
dinner theater or falling for a relatively charmless Beast (Dan Stevens, with a great singing voice even if I
kept thinking of Colm Wilkinson’s Jean Valjean). The film is much stronger, at least as surface-level
entertainment, in the village sequences, where good actors are conversing with each other, as opposed
to Beast’s castle where good actors do their best to bring visually displeasing CGI creations to life.

What works fine in animation–the various anthropomorphic dishes and tea cups singing and dancing–
comes off as awkward in live-action. Much of the Beast’s castle is visually drab and ugly, in contrast to
the bright and vibrant village sequences. That may be intentional, but since much of the film takes place
in said location, it’s akin to a horror movie set in a single poorly-lit locale. Further muddying the waters is
a series of digressions and complications that stretch the film to over two hours while offering little
beyond undoing what was a fat-free and airtight screenplay of logical cause-and-effect.

We get a new subplot explaining, in detail, what happened to Belle’s mother and Gaston gets more
scenes with Belle’s dad, which only serves to overly complicate Gaston’s third-act machinations. While
more Kevin Kline is a good thing, the extraneous material and altered emphasis has two significant
consequences. They make Gaston much more interesting than anyone else onscreen while pushing the
Beast himself into a narrative corner until the film’s second half. Both sabotage what should be the
movie’s core dramatic arc